Weak Endnotes

The winners of this year's Bancroft Prize are: Thomas G. Andrews's Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War, Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, and Pekka Hämäläinen's The Comanche Empire.

Meet Celia Chazelle, a medievalist who chairs the College of New Jersey's History Department. Her professional credentials are excellent -- could hardly be better -- but she's far from a remote ivy-tower academic. Take a look at her blog, Inside/ Outside, where she writes about her teaching experience in a state prison at Bordentown. It is featured in Michele Alperin's"Prison Instruction: A Respite from Isolation," US 1, 28 December.

The Historical Society's Randall Stephens announces the launch of its new blog, ths blog. He calls it a group blog, which probably means that it welcomes potential posts from other historians. Heather Cox Richardson of UMass, Amherst, is first up, with"Richardson's Rules of Order, Part I: Why Study History?" If ths blog can match the high quality of Historically Speaking, which Stephens also edits, you'll want to keep a close eye on it.

Mary Beth Norton,"One Nation, Under Ambiguity," Washington Post, 22 March, reviews Richard Beeman's Plain, Honest Men: The Making of The American Constitution.

Finally, Talking Points Memo's Book Café features a roundtable discussion of Juan Cole's new book, Engaging the Muslim World.